Thursday, July 28, 2011

Linked and Built Together

I've just begun to read Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank," a novel about the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. It's beautiful, but haunting and tragic, and with every page I further draw a personal connection. Today, I was reading on the metro ride home, and the line that stopped me most was, "Truth against the world." I read it over and over and said it out loud and made it my facebook status. I want to know what it means to me, I'm curious. In the context of the story line, it meant we must believe in our individual truths when the outside world embellishes our lives.

In a lot of ways, the story line in "Loving Frank" reminds me of Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying:" running away to a foreign country with a lover in order to discover oneself, and the discoveries one makes because of love affairs. Being deep within a woman's psyche we learn the sacrifices humans make to move forward, to reach discovery, but within those sacrifices, the deep hurt that is found and the blackness to the discoveries made.

When looking up, "Truth against the world," I fell upon this Frank Lloyd Wright quote, and it made me feel as if I am meant to be studying the man further as if I will continue to discover through his words and work (especially appropriate as I have been temping as a receptionist at an architect firm lately).

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating...